News Bites: Kurt Russell, 3D Van Damme, Oprah, and 'Real Steel'

There are a lot of little news bites floating around on this Wednesday:The Hollywood Reporter posts that Kurt Russell with star in a new supernatural thriller called Undying. A "neo-noir creeper," the film was written by Gary Whitta (Book of Eli) and focuses on a PI who gets sucked into the world of the supernatural when hired by a woman named Delia. Is it too much to hope for a little Plisskenesque camp in this baby? Production will kick off this fall.

You want to see those Brussels muscles in 3D? It's not quite the wow it would've been in the '80s, but Deadline reports that Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren are returning for a 3D Universal Soldier IV with John Hyams (director of Universal Soldier: Regeneration) once again behind the camera. Could this actually reach the big screen, or are these guys just banking on 3D TV?

On the smaller screen, there's a pretty interesting team-up happening at HBO. THR reports that Alan Ball, the man behind True Blood, is teaming with Oprah Winfrey to produce a telepic called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Ms. Lacks was a poor black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. "Without her consent, pieces of the tumor that killed her were removed and used for medical exploration and to build a billion-dollar research industry."

Finally, Variety reports that Anthony Mackie, who played Sergeant JT Sanborn in The Hurt Locker, will join Evangeline Lilly for DreamWorks' Real Steel. The sci-fi drama centers on a former boxer (Hugh Jackman) who teams up with his kid to train a robot for a championship fight. Mackie is the boxing promoter while Lilly is a friend of Jackman's. I wonder, is this what inspired robots v. wrestlers*?

*That same How I Met Your Mother episode also features filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich.